Macs with AD authentication and logon issues

[The_W]

Hi All

 

We have suite of mac's running a dual boot OSX 10.7 / Win7 OS Combination.

 

A strange issue seems to have occurred recently resulting in the 'Network Accounts Unavailable message' displaying and them machines not logging in to OSX

 

This only happens though when the machines have been booted into Win7 and logged in.

 

Scenario: user logs into mac (fine) | Reboots | Logs into Mac (Fine again), this can be done time and time again. Never fails

 

Users reboots and logs into Win7 (fine) | Reboots | attempts to login to MAC and is refused logon.

 

The only way to allow the MAC to log in at this point is to remove and re-seat the network cable.

 

This is very confusing and even more surprisingly has occurred in 2 different suites using 2 different OS X Servers with the same AD back bone.

 

I've not got a huge amount of MAC knowledge but i'm not a newbie. This has me beat though.

 

Any advice would be fantastic even if it is only debugging the logon window to work out why the logon process wont complete if the machine has been booted to Win7 and then rebooted.

 

Thanks

[Chris_Cook]

Can you log into the mac with a local admin account after win 7 has broken things? This might help give some clues as to what state the computer is in.

 

I would check things like whether you have a basic network connection running, whether the time is out, whether the dns entry for the computer matches the ip address.

 

I suspect it might be some sort of power saving mode for the network interface, or possibly if your computer names are the same for win 7 and mac os, it might be getting confused.

[Tricky_Dicky]

I'd check time. Sounds obvious but it has often caused problems here if the Mac and the AD server are more than 5 minutes apart

[The_W]

Hi All

 

Just wanted to post and say thanks for the advice.

 

Actually resolved this issue today.

 

The cause was Time Sync Issues - Caused by Windows DayLight Saving.

 

Here is how I tracked it down.

 

This site shows the Open D Logs - OS X Server: Changing opendirectoryd logging levels

viewing the logs showed the timestamp in the file was an hour ahead of time at logon when returning from Windows.

 

I then used the advice here - Fix Incorrect Clock Settings in Windows When Dual-Booting with OS X or Linux -

Applied the fix and and rebooted.

 

Worked first time.

 

I am guessing Windows Sets the time and adds an hour for DayLight Saving. Returning to OSX this time change is not reverted at the logon. When the device is logged into OSX the mac picks up its time from a local server. So is set correctly again.

 

Hope this helps other in the future.